Richard Gonzales

Steve Barrett
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Richard Gonzales is NPR's National Desk Correspondent based in San Francisco. Along with covering the daily news of region, Gonzales' reporting has included medical marijuana, gay marriage, drive-by shootings, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown, the U.S. Ninth Circuit, the California State Supreme Court and any other legal, political, or social development occurring in Northern California relevant to the rest of the country.

Gonzales joined NPR in May 1986. He covered the U.S. State Department during the Iran-Contra Affair and the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Four years later, he assumed the post of White House Correspondent and reported on the prelude to the Gulf War and President George W. Bush's unsuccessful re-election bid. Gonzales covered the U.S. Congress for NPR from 1993-94, focusing on NAFTA and immigration and welfare reform.

In September 1995, Gonzales moved to his current position after spending a year as a John S. Knight Fellow Journalism at Stanford University.

In 2009, Gonzales won the Broadcast Journalism Award from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. He also received the PASS Award in 2004 and 2005 from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for reports on California's juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.

Prior to NPR, Gonzales was a freelance producer at public television station KQED in San Francisco. From 1979 to 1985, he held positions as a reporter, producer, and later, public affairs director at KPFA, a radio station in Berkeley, CA.

Gonzales graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in psychology and social relations. He is a co-founder of Familias Unidas, a bi-lingual social services program in his hometown of Richmond, California.

It's time to update your copy of the periodic table. Four new elements discovered in recent years have now been named, pending final approval by the international group of scientists in charge of the table.

Two gunmen opened fire in a central Tel Aviv food and retail center, killing four people Wednesday evening in what Israeli police say was a terrorist attack.

NPR's Emily Harris reports that Israeli medical authorities say that another four people were wounded. Local police tell Emily that two men were apprehended in the attack. Both are Palestinians in their 20s. They are cousins, according to the police, and from the same town near Hebron in the West Bank.

Washington, D.C., will be the next major city to implement a $15 minimum wage rate following a unanimous vote Tuesday by its city council.

In a victory for local and national labor unions, Washington joins the ranks of cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle in raising wages for primarily lower-income workers in restaurants, retail and other service industries.

The District's current hourly minimum wage is $10.50, and it was scheduled to go up to $11.50 next month under a law enacted in 2014.

In what's being called perhaps the biggest sports auction in history, Brazilian soccer legend Pele is auctioning off his collection of memorabilia and awards collected overmore than five decades.

The three-day auction of more than 2,000 items started Tuesday in London by the Los Angeles-based Julien's Auctions and is expected to bring in millions of dollars. Pele said in a statement that a portion of the proceeds are to go to Pequeno Principe, the largest children's hospital in Brazil.

Swiss voters over the weekend dealt a stern backslap to a ballot proposal that would have guaranteed a basic monthly income for all 8.1 million residents — regardless of their employment status — of that wealthy European nation.

The vote wasn't even close. Almost 77 percent of voters rejected the proposal that the government give every adult in Switzerland about $2,500 every month. (Children would have received a smaller subsidy of $650.)

The family of Kate Steinle, the 32-year-old woman who was killed in San Francisco last year allegedly by a man in the U.S. illegally, has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the city and two federal agencies, blaming them for her death.

The lawsuit was filed just before the anniversary of Steinle's death. The killing reignited an angry debate over so-called sanctuary city policies, which limit local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

This year's tax day marks a historic event for one group of Americans: April 18 will be the first time that every married same-sex couple in the country can file both their federal and state taxes together.

It's something Colleen and Linda Squires have been waiting for for a long time.

Every day hundreds of immigrants — asylum seekers, legal residents and some here illegally — are being incarcerated at taxpayer expense after they've been ordered released because they are too poor to pay the cash bond set by the federal government, according to a class-action lawsuit.

Not long ago, the city of Richmond, Calif., was considered one of the most dangerous cities in America. There was a skyrocketing homicide rate fueled by gangs of young men settling personal or territorial disputes.

The House today endorsed a lawsuit that challenges President Obama's executive actions on immigration. By a largely party-line 234-186 vote, the lawmakers authorized Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to file a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit brought by Texas and 25 other states. That suit argues the president overstepped his authority when he decided to block deportation of some four million immigrants.

Updated at 4:24 p.m. on Feb. 17: Pedro Figueroa was released on bail from an ICE detention center on Feb. 3.Also, the San Francisco Police Department initially denied that it had cooperated with federal immigration agents. But an internal ICE document shows that the police and sheriff were in direct communication with ICE about Figueroa.

In Fresno, California — the heart of that state's agricultural community — police are looking for whoever attacked two elderly Sikh-American men. The incidents happened a week apart over the holidays. One man was fatally stabbed, another badly beaten.

With President Obama's executive actions to shield up to five million immigrants from deportation now stalled in the courts, the conventional wisdom is that his proposal is a loser for the administration and the Democrats. Twenty-six states filed suit to stop him and it's safe to say an energized Republican base hasn't been enthusiastic about the president's idea.

Without much fanfare, the Obama administration recently took a significant step towards helping lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, people fleeing persecution. The State Department is expanding its interpretation of the term "spouse" to include partners of same sex refugees and asylum seekers.

At the same time that immigration is a hot-button issue on the presidential campaign trail, in the courts, immigration advocates are chipping away at the government's authority to detain non-citizens indefinitely.

Two rulings issued this week from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California say that detainees have the right to a bond hearing while they are fighting their deportation cases.

A new report on conditions in immigrant detention centers around the country finds a systematic and ongoing failure by the Obama administration to adequately inspect facilities run by public and private contractors. The report alleges a pattern of basic human rights violations leading to deaths, suicides, violence and sexual assaults in facilities that were given a clean bill of health by federal inspectors.

That's one of the questions raised by California Gov. Jerry Brown as he vetoed a bill Thursday that would have protected immigrants—legal or not—with low level drug offenses from deportation.

In California, anyone who gets popped for a minor drug offense, like smoking a joint, can plead guilty and volunteer for drug treatment—usually about a year. Upon successful completion of drug counseling, that charge and conviction is wiped off one's record like it never happened.

Federal immigration officials are issuing far fewer detainer requests, also known as immigration holds, to state and local law enforcement agencies seeking immigrants who are in this country illegally. At the same time, the requests that are issued don't appear to be targeting serious, or convicted, criminals.

A new government report recommends that the U.S. Border Patrol double its internal affairs investigators to focus on corruption and the alleged mistreatment of migrants along the Mexican border.

The interim report, written at the request of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, focuses on three themes: rooting out corruption within the agency; reining in the unauthorized use of force by Border Patrol agents; and improving departmental transparency.